Google hefts MySQL service into cloud

Google has pushed its MySQL-based cloud database service into general availability, months after beginning a wholesale shift of internal production servers to MariaDB.

The new service encrypts customer data, supports databases up to 500GB in size, and has a 99.95 percent uptime service-level agreement, the company announced on Tuesday.

Prices for the underlying infrastructure range from $0.36 per day up to $46.84 per day, depending on the gear on which admins choose to run the databases.

This compares with the somewhat more expensive offering from chief rival Amazon Web Services, whose Relational Database Service costs from $0.60 to $113.40 per day with further discounts if you reserve gear for between a year and three years, or Microsoft's Windows Azure which starts at as little as $0.16 per day and goes up from there.

As canny readers may be able to infer, figuring out how to price different cloud services against one another is difficult, since each provider uses a different unit of time to price their services, and each service will wrap-in other underlying infrastructure costs and leave out others.

For Google's system, customer data is automatically replicated into multiple data centers in multiple zones, giving users greater redundancy in case some of Google's data centers are stomped by Godzilla have problems. Additionally, the service automates patch management, backups, and administration of the systems, as well. Cloud SQL is regularly patched to keep it in sync with version 5.5 of MySQL, we understand.

"The most common use cases are when developers are looking for standard MySQL databases but don't want to do much of the leg work," a Google spokesperson told us.

Though Google has based Cloud SQL on MySQL, the company is itself moving over a thousand internal production servers off of MySQL and to rival system MariaDB.

At the time of writing, Google had not responded to a question from us on why it was continuing to maintain MySQL alongside MariaDB, when either can stand in for the other. ®